Mel Gibson, an actor in southern California, was driving home from a midnight mass with his girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, bringing back a half-full bottle of wine and a cake. The sun had long since set, and the blackness of the sky was punctured by stars. It was Easter, and it was quiet. Mel Gibson rolled down the window. He heard the sound of birds outside, an uncommon sound, and uncommonly peaceful.
Mel Gibson drove on and thought that there was no better or happier day than the day he had just experienced. A year before, he had been married to another woman entirely, and Oksana Grigorieva had been in the arms of another man. Now, the two of them were united by love, and all seemed bright, joyous, and happy. He thought about his acting, and her singing, and thought that it was all going well, that the life they shared was all his heart desired—there was enough of everything and all of it good; he looked at his girlfriend, and she seemed to him lovely, kind, and gentle. He was delighted by the blackness of the sky, and the brilliance of the stars, and the purr of his expensive automobile, and the tweet of the birds. Most of all he was delighted by the cake, which was round and sweet, like the face of his girlfriend, and like the love that was between them. And when on the way home, they stopped into a seafood restaurant so that he could have a drink, he felt happier still. After they drank, they went walking, and Mel Gibson stopped in another bar for another drink, and then they went walking again.
“You know what they say. ‘A great day,’” he said. His voice was high and pinched: from excitement, he told himself. “It is great,” he said.
“Wait a moment, Oksana, and look at the stars. They dance in the night sky. They are rejoicing too!”
“They are not alive,” said Oksana Grigorieva.
“Don’t contradict me!” exclaimed Mel Gibson. He heard his voice at high pitch again—now the excitement was mixed with a bit of anger—and breathed deeply to calm himself. “Diane Keaton once told me that there are people on all the planets, and on the sun, moon, and stars. She was not sure it was true, but she heard the news from Jack Nicholson, who . . .” He trailed off. “What is that over there, slumped behind that bus stop?”
Mel Gibson pointed. Oksana Grigorieva followed the direction of his finger, where she saw a gaunt, bearded man wearing what seemed to be a long white robe. He was leaning up against a large planter and running one hand along the underside of one of his pale, thin feet.
“It’s Jesus!” Mel Gibson shouted to him. “Jesus Christ! He has risen!”
“Truly He is risen,” answered the gaunt man, without raising his head.
Mel Gibson approached the man. “What are you doing?”
“I fell ill. I could not go further.”
“What is wrong?”
“I have pain in every limb and a shortness of breath.”
“That is terrible,” Mel Gibson said. “It is a holiday, and you are here, weakened and in despair. You should go to a hotel or a hospital. What’s the use of sitting here?”
The gaunt man raised his head, and with big, exhausted eyes, scanned Mel Gibson and Oksana Grigorieva.
“Did you go to church?” he asked.
“Yes.” Mel Gibson looked at Oksana Grigorieva. “In fact, we are coming from there. She’s Russian. Eastern Orthodox.”
“Really?” the gaunt man said. “I am Russian as well. But I was not so lucky to be in a beautiful mass. The holiday found me on the sidewalk.
It was not God’s will for me to reach a place of rest. I would go somewhere safe, but I don’t have the strength. Good man, would you give a wayfarer some Easter cake to break his fast?”
“Easter cake?” Mel Gibson repeated, “As a matter of fact, I do have some cake. We got it for after the mass. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
Mel Gibson opened the back seat of his car and took out the cake, after which he fumbled quickly in his pockets and glared at Oksana Grigorieva. “A little help?” he said. “Will you get a goddamned knife? I don’t want to just grab a hunk of cake.”
“No knife,” Oksana Grigorieva said, shrugging.
Mel Gibson cleared his throat. He could feel a surge within him—excitement again, or possibly anger. He was about to speak to Oksana Grigorieva when he heard the thin man’s voice. “I might have something,” he said, groaning and rolling over on his side. “I have a bag here. Let me look.”
Oksana Grigorieva clucked her tongue and took one sharp step toward Mel Gibson. “No, no,” she said. “I won’t let you slice up the Easter cake this way. Let’s get back to the house and break the fast there.”
She took another step and grabbed the cake out of Mel Gibson’s hands.
“This isn’t a meatloaf of a sheet of brownies,” she said. “It’s a holy Easter cake. And it’s a sin to cut it the wrong way, at the wrong time.”
“A sin?” Mel Gibson said. “Well, it’s also a sin to be a f . . . ” He trailed off. The thin man was right there before him, stretched out on the ground, and Mel Gibson was chastened. “Let’s go,” he said tersely, after which he spoke under his breath to the thin man: “The lady forbids the cake. She forbids it. Goodbye, then, and good luck on your journey!”
Mel Gibson got back in the car, turned the ignition, and the engine roared to life. Oksana Grigorieva was still grumbling that cutting the Easter cake before reaching home was a sin. When they had gone two blocks, Mel Gibson pulled over and craned his neck backward. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Can you believe that? How can that happen? What a goddamned sin. What a shame. We didn’t give him any Easter cake, Oksana, and we should have. What kind of person . . .” He trailed off again. Stars still shone in the dark setting of the sky, and birdsong came through the windows, but Mel Gibson barely noticed. He remained silent all the way home, thinking and keeping his eyes fixed on the dashboard of his expensive automobile. For some unknown reason he felt overcome by depression, and not a trace of the holiday gladness was left in his heart. When he had arrived home and said, “Christ is risen” to his house staff, he grew cheerful again, but when he had sat down to break the fast and had taken a bite from his piece of Easter cake, he sighed heavily and looked over at Oksana Grigorieva. “It wasn’t right,” he said. “Not right at all. Don’t you see that?”
“I see a little girl who is supposed to be my husband,” said Oksana Grigorieva, frowning. “You’re going to cry like a baby because you couldn’t give away your precious cake? Now that it is cut and lying on the table, go: give it to him. Do you suppose I care?”
Mel Gibson tried to speak calmly, but a hotness leapt into his tone.
“Shut up,” he said. “We should have given the man some. He was on the street, without a home, not well in any way.”
Mel Gibson drank half a glass of wine, and neither ate nor drank anything more. He had no appetite, the wine seemed to choke him, and he felt depressed again. After breaking their fast, he and Oksana Grigorieva lay down to sleep. When Oksana Grigorieva woke two hours later, Mel Gibson was standing by the window, looking into the yard.
“What the hell?” she said.
“I can’t sleep,” he said. “It just makes me mad. We were unkind, you and I.”
“One-track mind,” she said. “If even that.”
“Don’t you interrupt me,” Mel Gibson said. “I’m warning you. We don’t know a thing about the man. He could have been a prophet, and we treated him as though he were a pig. A sick man like that is a test of the health of our spirit. We ought to have brought him here and fed him, and we did not even give him a morsel of bread.”
“I explained it to you. It’s like you never listen. I wasn’t about to ruin the Easter cake. You would have cut it by the bus stop and made a mockery of all that is holy?”
Without saying anything to Oksana Grigorieva, Mel Gibson went into the kitchen, wrapped a piece of cake up in a napkin, together with half a dozen eggs, and went to the room where the maid and cook, who were husband and wife, slept.
“Louis, wake up,” he said to the cook. “Take the Mercedes, or the Volkswagen, and go back up to Grand Avenue. Around Fifth Street you’ll see a sick man by a bus stop. Give him this. Maybe he’s still there.”
After waiting for Louis for about forty-five minutes, Mel Gibson could bear it no longer, so he went out and hopped into the BMW. On San Pedro, he ran into Louis. “Did you see the man?” Mel Gibson said.
“No,” Louis said. “Can’t find him anywhere.”
“God damn it,” Mel Gibson said. He got out of his car, took the bundle from Louis, and walked the rest of the way. A few doorways down from where he had left the man, he saw some other beggars. “Have you seen a sick man?” he said. “Thin and pale, in a white robe?”
“There was an old woman collecting cans,” said one elderly beggar.
“There was a crazy guy who said he was riding a horse. But no one else.”
Mel Gibson got home just before dawn.
“I can’t get that man out of my head,” he said to Oksana Grigorieva.
“He gives me no peace. I keep thinking: what if God meant to try us, and sent some saint or angel in the form of a beggar?”
“Holy living crap,” cried Oksana. “Can you talk about anything else?”
“You are not kind,” said Mel Gibson, looking into his girlfriend’s face. “There are kind women, and there are bi...” He stopped himself.
Once again he remembered the thin man, stretched out by the bus stop, imploring him for a slice of Easter cake, and once again it restrained him.
“I may be unkind,” cried Oksana Grigorieva, “but I am not going to give away the holy Easter cake to every drunken man on the street.”
“He wasn’t drunk!”
“He was drunk!”
At this, Mel Gibson lost his temper entirely. He got up from the table, clenched his fists at his sides, and began to reproach Oksana Grigorieva. “F*** off,” he said. “F***ing idiot! F***ing fool! I don’t love you any longer.”
Oksana Grigorieva answered in kind, which only made Mel Gibson angrier. “I hope that you f***ing die!” he shouted at her. “I am going to lock you in this f***ing house and then burn the f***ing place down, but not before you blow me!” Mel Gibson went outside and walked around in the yard for a half-hour or so, picturing his wife’s face, which now seemed spiteful and ugly. And as though to torment him the thin man haunted his brain, and Mel Gibson seemed to see now his sick eyes, now his long pale feet.
“F*** her,” he muttered. “We were unkind to the man.”
He was overcome by an insufferable depression such as he had never felt before. He kicked a tree as hard as he could, and then another tree. Then, he went back inside and drank. Oksana Grigorieva was in the bedroom, and when she emerged he greeted her with another round of invective, shoring at her that she looked ridiculous with her “f***ing fake tits” and that she deserved to “have a bunch of f***ing beggars run a train” on her. A punch was thrown. Mel Gibson brandished a weapon. On the morning of Easter Monday, he drank some more to sober himself, and got drunk again.
And with that his downfall began.
His career dried up; the cars disappeared one by one from the garage; Mel Gibson was more and more often drunk; debts mounted; he felt an aversion to Oksana Grigorieva. Mel Gibson put down all his misfortunes to the fact that he had an unkind woman, and above all, that God was angry with him on account of the thin man.
Oksana Grigorieva saw their ruin, but who was to blame for it she did not understand.